Today was an excellent work day. I wrote 4,000 words (about 16 pages). They were good words, too. The scenes today flowed really, really well. My bad guy is a baaaadddd dude. It’s fun to write.

That is pretty much all I did today, except watch the baseball game sandwiched around taking the pups for a walk and eating dinner. That was nice. I got enough writing done beforehand to do that completely guilt-free.

This A’s team is one I don’t feel like I’ve written about all that much, but holy moly are they talented. Our Achilles heel is that we don’t have an ace, and the front end of our bullpen, the pitchers we put in the game when it’s early on or when we’re behind, are trash. The back end of our bullpen, however, is one of the best in the game. Legitimately: we might have one of the top three 7th/8th/9th-inning combos in all of baseball. Buchner, Trivino, and Treinen. They’re a lights-out, game over trio. And our offense is a top-10 offense. Crap, can they hit. We might have room for improvement when it comes to getting on base a little more, but we have home-run threats literally from top to bottom. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had eight or nine hitters in double-digit home runs by the end of the year.

So, yeah…we’re a good team. We’re not an elite team yet, but we’re a good team. We really need a pair of reliable, ace-quality pitchers to anchor our rotation…and there are some possible candidates in our minor-league system to replace the three to four bullpen pitchers we have that are completely inept right now. That’s all to say: we’re a *fixable* elite team. Plug those holes, and we could be really, really, really good. It’ll be an interesting trade season.

That’s all I really got for you, dear readers, tonight. I’m going to read for a while, then go to bed. Tomorrow is an “off” day, which means I’ll only be putting in about an hours’ worth of writing time. My goal is 1,500 words. That’s a good finished scene.

I’m no longer sure if I’ll actually be finishing the book this week/weekend…but I will be really, really close to that. Maybe a couple work days more after this week. But, we’ll see. Brevity is the soul of wit…but it is definitely not yet the soul of this book. It’s gonna be freaking 165,000 words by the time I finish. Ugh.

Onward!

Good night 🙂